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Hardware

Free Cable Modem From The Shack 163

Posted by timothy from the howard-countians-count-your-blessings dept.
Linuxathome writes: "I spent over $100 recently at a local Radio Shack (Columbia, Md.) and they gave me a free RCA cable modem with no strings attached (at least, to the best of my knowledge). Actually, it wasn't quite free, I still had to pay the 5% tax on it. Comcast has some deal with the Shack to push as much hardware as possible in hopes that the consumer will order the cable broadband service. At least I won't have to rent the equipment. I wonder how Comcast can actually make money this way? Especially since the Shack consumer has absolutely no obligation to buy the service. They can't even guarantee the buyer lives in an area where Comcast is providing service. Time to figure if this bad boy acts nice with a linux router." Soon we will be buried in "free" hardware and AOL CDs. Has anyone else encountered this giveaway? Is there any use more clever than signing up for cable Internet service? (And can you examine data which passes through it without violating an implied agreement? ;) )
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Free Cable Modem From The Shack

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  • The REAL Deal (Score:5)

    by FKell ( 253556 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @06:55PM (#542366)
    We noticed this about 2 weeks ago over at Anandtech.

    Here is the REAL Deal. The way it is suppose to work is if you purchase $100 worth of stuff at Radio Shack, they will give you a cable modem free with a 1 year subscription to Comcast Cable Modem service. Now supposedly it is under the constraint that you purchase a 1 year subscription at Radio Shack, but it seems that no one informed Radio Shack that this is how it works. Instead 90% of the Radio Shacks are just giving you the mode free with the purchase of $100.

    Origionally a lot of us (meaning Anandteckers), assumed that the management never told the workers at Radio Shack how things work with this deal, but after seeing how widespread this was, the new concensus is that Management goofed. There is a copy of the ACTUAL deal/promo floating around on the net somewhere, but I don't remember offhand and really don't feal like looking it up right now (hey its Christmas weekend).

    Good luck to all those who get in on this, like I mentioned its about a 90% chance that you will not have to sign into a 1 year deal. If they ask you to, just go to the other Radio Shack that's 2 miles down the road :)

  • I fear the merger.. just think... AOL can bring its horrible service over to cable modems... Just think.. they can corner the market, but then again, i could always get 900 cds and just keep usign "free trials". Oh well.. and.. Verizon DSL is a joke.. The morons went 4 months trying to fix my service.. come to find out.. some tech guy turned off our service for no apparent reason.. then it took another month and a half for them to turn it on again.. These people are morons.. I use the internet to aviod talking to idiots.. instead i spent 3 hours a day with tech support telling them that thye should go ahead and turn back on my account..
  • @Home usually costs most people $40 a month, and this fee includes the leasing of the cable modem. However, if you own a cable modem, you only have to pay $30 a month.
  • I recently bought a RCA dish and receiver combo for $50 at the local Best Buy. After finding out that I did not have a direct line of sight to the satellite (!@#$@$ tree!!!), I signed up for Digital Cable through MediaOne [mediaone.com] (recently bought out by AT&T Broadband).

    Now it turns out that MediaOne is offering a promotion to dish owners-- Turn in your dish, and get a $200 credit towards digital cable service (about 5 months worth). So for a $50 dish, I get $200 worth of Digital Cable, plus a really fancy cable box that actually works well with my TiVo.

    From AT&T Promo E-mail:
    Do you have AT&T Road Runner service, but still have that Dish on your house? Well, here's your chance to dump that dish!

    If you give up your dish AT&T Broadband will give you $200! Now when you sign up for Digital Cable you'll get a FREE installation and $200 in discount coupons* you can apply toward your monthly cable bill. Plus, we'll haul away your satellite dish and receiver for free! This is a limited time offer, so call us today at 1-877-407-7862.

    *Call AT&T Broadband for complete details about service and prices. Certain services are available separately or as part of other levels of service and not all services are available in all areas. You must subscribe to a Digital Cable Package to receive the (4) $50 discount coupons.
  • You may want to look into Starband, available any where you have a south facing view in north america, and 400kb/s not to shabby, resonably priced too. http://www.starband.com
  • According to an article from PriceWaterhouseCoopers [pwcglobal.com], the US ranks third in high speed connections per capita. First is Germany (with extensive ISDN), and second Canada (where 22% of internet users have cable or ADSL). As a canadian i can believe this. I remember everyone getting cable or DSL back in grade 10 - 11 (i graduated couple years ago). I suspect cable is cheaper here; i pay $26.90 (in american dollars) / month. The US is not the only wired place!
  • When I signed up for ADSL through BellSouth they gave me the modem outright, as long as I stay with the service 60 days. This really isn't much of a commitment. It's a slick move because it's a much better deal than leasing the modem or requiring a year (like Telocity), but they are probably assuming that once you are blown away by the speed you will not want to be discontinuing the service.
  • @home doesn't seem to do port scans anymore now that I added them to my dropped route list. I currently have www, ftp, telnet, dns, half life servers all running off my cable connection.
  • word! i think it's about time to see the demise of aol. it's only right that the cable, isdn, dsl, T3s come and rise, and smash aol into pieces of dark matter. i am just totally sick of aol, and am uphauled by the WAKNESS of aol, and most of the users too, and all the people who don't realize that there's a life beyond aol, and microsoft.
    a long time ago there were a lot of ppl
  • I'm not sure what company is providing the modem, but the Wiz computer store in NYC is giving out free cable modems too. You have to spend $250 to get one for free.. i'm sketchy on the details as i live near Detroit and just seen the ads on satelite
  • I recently received a (hand-written) refund check from Comcast and I don't know why. They weren't my cable provider at my old address, and they aren't my provider at my new address. Nothing in the hand-addresses envelope except the check.
  • Why would I want to give someone a radio shack brand name item? (say, for xmas)

    Why?

    And what would I spend 100 dollars on in Radio Shack?

    [shudder]

  • "Until these things are cracked"? Not quite. Cable modems are more like cell phones. Unless the network you are physically connected to registers your device, you ain't gonna get connectivity for free. So it's not a simple software/hardware hack to get your cable modem working for free. You need to sign up for their service.

    That's not a bad thing. I like the fact folks want to make their money off of ongoing service, rather than up-front setup charges, which always gave me a bad taste in my mouth...

    A given brand of cable modem isn't going to act as a magic router device for you; they're designed to talk to specific head-end equipment installed by the cable company (and you won't be getting that free any time soon :-)

    BTW: don't listen to the myth that the DSL companies push, that the more people on cable the slower it gets. Fibre typically gets to each neighborhood, and each neithborhood typically gets the equivalent of the switch. How many corporations are successfully sharing high speed internet connectivity with hundreds of people on a 10mbps or 100mbs link successfully. A lot. It's fibre to the neighborhood, and a local high speed LAN for you and your neighbors (but more secure, as the cable modems disallow snooping). The marketing hype from DSL makes me sick. (Although DSL itself is a reasonable solution, too, at least for downloading, regardless of the misinformation.)

    -me-

  • Klowner, we rehashed the Satellite access for about 500 comments worth about 3 weeks ago right here on Slashdot. If you search for the articles that I posted on it, it's got most all the details you could ever want. Click on me and email me if you want to talk specifics.

    Hey, that -IS- one example. At least, probably of the brand of canned corn this guy tried with his Cue Cat. It's incredible difficult to sell something to someone (even if it's free) if they can't see a use for it. Actually, come to think of it, I've used mine a few times to avoid having to use a search engine to search for recipes!! It works pretty well for stuff like that. :-)
    I do love having the satellite hookup at the store, and having a customer come in and ask about the CueCat, and I ask them if they have anything in their pockets with a barcode on it. Like a pack of cigarettes, or bubblegum, or whatnot. Page loads instantly. Customer's jaw drops, if they've never seen anything faster than 56k.
    It's beautiful :)

  • You can still use the AOL service if you have a cable modem. It is cheaper if you don't pay AOL for their dialup accounts. This means that they are moving toward offering a content rich site, thus they don't care who uses the dialup side.

    Of course the deal with Time Warner, allows them to move from providing low speed internet access to high bandwidth, content rich media with a well known and loyal subscriber base.

    I am not one of them, but their business model with the merger, is far from unstable.

  • The DSL service would have to be active, and there is a noticeable hiss on a phone line that has DSL with no filters. There is a noticeable hiss even _with_ the filters installed !
    In other words, I don't think this is possible.
  • know just what you mean .... What position are you in which store or district number? I'm a sales ass @ 9481 in 0866
  • Have a free cadle mobem!
  • ISDN is high speed? Har de har har! What a laugh! ISDN is yesterday's idea of high speed. Like a 64K leased line, already! Bwa ha ha!
  • I am an @home user, and when I first read this, I was skeptical on the fine print. First, I don't trust Radio Shack. Second, I don't trust "free" hardware. I have had a shitload of problems in the past with my cable modem service, in fact, just today, they changed my IP address. That caused my routing tables to become completely fubar. But back to the subject. I was told a free installation, and 3 months free modem rental, at least with Charter@Home. They charged me $60 for my "free" install, and they never gave me free modem rental. Now, I have friends who work for Radio Shack, and I will talk to him about it, everything has strings attached to it, or the modem is a POS, and they are just trying to get rid of it.
  • Cable is split between everyone in your neighborhood. I learned this when I was got a cable modem, and my friend next door got one too. So, even if you got a second line, you would be pulling bandwith off your other modem. I now am the only one in my neighborhood with a cable modem, and I am somewhat pleased with the service. Read my other post about the shit expierience with @home. But, just stick with your one modem, Danny. The only way I recomend doing that, is to get a DSL, and Cable, and use those as your primary net connection. That is an experiment that I have been wanting to try for a long ass time, just don't have the hardware, or money for that matter.
  • Actually, Perl, the satellite is -way- slow to get you started. The latency (ping time) is a MINIMUM 450ms, and it's usually worse. But you're absolutely right, after the connection gets hooked, it's awesome. CyberPatrol does add some overhead to that.. but it sure beats having a public kiosk with full open access. *laugh*
  • cablevision is offering the same deal at the wiz, spend $100 and get hte modem free, but i believ you have to pay the $29.95 montly fee
  • yeah, I know exactly what you mean there, BN. I've got 5 100MBps lines and 1 10Mbps line connected via a 33.6 also. Fortunatly only two computers are ever in use at a time. :)
  • What is it with these boxes everywhere in the audio world that don't do anything?

    I once began upgrading a "pro" sound reinforcement system that had a bad habit if squealing like a banshee. I pulled the plugs on everything in sight and started configuring the system all over again.

    There was this mysterious box connected between the mixer and power amps. It used line level in's and out's and sported the same unique brand as the house speakers, but didn't require external power or give any hint as to its purpose.

    When reconnecting everything, I left it out. Guess what--no more banshee!

    I removed the cover and the thing was chock full of all sorts of electronic components. I will probably never know what the salesman told the greenhorns who bought it.

  • Great, you're promoting theft. I bet your parents are very proud of you.
  • Dear god The phone company knows I call 1 900 numbers I bet there calling playboy right now and saying this guys horny send him subscription info. And I don't thinkg you even know what your talking about there is code for every platform for the cuecat stuff...
  • I have dsl and I've never noticed a hiss with the filters, you might have the filters on backwards( you won't believe how many people do this) and they might be defective, they aren't exactly going for the goodstuff with these filters you know
  • My Comcast deal segments out I think its 9 bucks for the rental of the modem, if I choose to purchase mine ($350!!!) than that will be taken off my bill... I don't see me buying a modem any time soon, since after finally getting the modem installed, more and more people are bringing my bandwith down. I think its time to consider buisness class DSL with some CIR's.

  • CueCat (Score:3)

    by gurnb ( 80987 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @06:24PM (#542395) Homepage
    Is there a CueCat attached to it?
  • hmm. Now I understand why everyone not in the midwest talks trash about RS. Gilat has been called starband since before it became available, and has nothing to do with @Home. And if you go through our press releases (this was announced like -everywhere-) we're working with @Home to provide cable modems across the US. But so far it's just testing on the east coast.

  • get this (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i heard that VA is giving away FREE vi or emacs editors. vi! emacs! no more tubesnakes, mom!! free cable modems?? sounds like a plot! get katz on this moffo AZAP!!
  • It says somewhere in the @home agreement that the modem is included (leased) in the monthly fee. Although it does say that the agreement can be changed at any time without notice.. But anyway they have never sold cable modems, or at least they haven't offered them to me. Ill call them. (though daddy needs a new sound system anyway)
  • on the subject of speed with a cable modem, im an getting tired of seeing "cable modem booster" you can tweak windows reg settings, of course the windows registry is a tweak, but you can not un capped your modem. Its not capped, the router is. so if you see it don't d/l it. its rather amusing that people would widly distibute something that dosent work. Wait a minute coming back to windows 98 :P shoot the only stable os they made was dos, and from what i know they bought that. And added apple's gui to it.
  • i've got comcast and they've been promising cable modem service "soon" for the last YEAR, with no change in status .. i'm dying here on my dial up .. too far in the boonies of manassas for DSL too .. ackkk *expires while waiting for /. to load*
  • You mean a pokey-network, or did a fast-Ethernet wireless equivalent appear recently? I just can't deal with limited bandwidth when it's my own network. Enough of that at work.

  • Hey, I've done some quick researching into this deal. Here's the deal. If you buy a cable modem in the areas where this is opened (this is just happening in a few test markets), right now, they are giving you a $100 gift certificate. Therefore, they use this $100 gift certificate to buy the stuff you purchased for $100. Effectively, as you all sum it up, a free cable modem for purchasing $100.

    It apparently does -NOT- require that you sign up for the service - the modem is effectively useless without having the cable service.
    I did this same gig in my market (detroit) with a gift certificate promotion on some older cell phones i needed to get rid of - free phone with 60 minutes prepaid service, all you had to do was spend $50. It's really quite a nice deal.
    RadioShack is not all bad. In fact, it's mostly good. Maybe it's because most of you guys aren't in my area, or what not, but I train my people the right way. So :-P
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What else would be needed to make 2 or more of these modems talk to each other (besides some 75 ohm coax and F connectors)?

  • AOL is buying Time-Warner.

    Time-Warner is my TV and internet cable provider.

    You were wondering why the buyout?

  • If you're burried in those crappy CD's that AOL and various other ISP's send out, there are some fun things to do with them: 1) Mount them on a wall backwards, so the shiny part shows. This makes for some really sweet lighting effects. 2) Take them, along with your favorite shotgun and go skeet shooting. 3) Throw them at the wall like a frisbee and watch them shatter. It's a good stress reliever.
  • If cable does not get slower when more people are on it they why does the cable modem I use at the office (Colleyville, TX) get slower when school gets out and on days with no school? This does not happen on my personal cable modem nor does it happen on my DSL line 1500/128 (Euless, TX). About corps sharing a 100 mbs link, of corse they have great speed with a lot of people on it! They are NOT downloading from napster or porn sites!!!
  • that the :cuecat wasn't made by radioslut, but it was made by digital:convergence...
    radioslut just shacked up a deal to distribute them
    it's not like you guys are hating wired magizine too right? topic should be free cable modem- Body = buy $100 worth of junk at radioshack, get a free modem, then return it! :)
  • This is assuming that christmas is a christian holiday. The fact of the matter is that most cultures around the world have feastivities around the winder solstice. The comming of the shortest day of the year means that the days are starting to get longer, and there is hope for spring. The christian church adopted the old pagen European customs, and changed the significance of the meaning of this holiday to repressent the birth of christ. The christian church had done this to many aspects of pagen European culture. To win over converts, the church found that adopting the more enjoyable aspects of pre-christian Europe was very effective.

    As an aside, the devil that is part of christian mythology was actually adapted from the god of festivity from the original pagan mythology.

    It should be noted that I am a Canadian athiest who celebrates the winter festivities. I don't believe christmas has anything to do with christ.

    Do not flame back about the first six letters of the word christmas, it was the christian church who coined the word. I am sure the various european cultures had their own word for the winter festival for 1000s of years before the christian church came to power around the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century AD (476AD is commonly cited in the history books)

  • Just because the cable is split means nothing. It's still capped at 500k/s down and about 150k/s upstream.. and there is a lot more bandwidth out there than that, no?
  • Ran into problems with a RCA cable modem/router just several days ago. Couldn't even get a link light with a Watchguard SOHO firewall. The ISP refused to help with the problem. Might want to make certain that the ISP will support the "free" hardware you get in case you run into problems. (To finally solve the problem we installed a different cable modem/router and had to set it to the duplex and speed of the port on the firewall).
  • When do us aussies get free cable modems and decently priced high speed access? Optus@Home has some fucked up "Quality policy" type thing. They used to be good but are slowly going down the toilet. Tel$tra will pretty much always be crap :)
  • Maybe you're missing the key point here... the cable modem is free, if it breaks I can go back to leasing. It's not as if I can't spend $100 at Radio Shack and come away with stuff I want/need.
  • Hell, ill do it !!!.
    I could use a new cable modem.
    Im probably going to buy myself
    a digital camera anyways.

  • I'm still paying over 10 bucks a month to "rent" my cable modem, as I have been for more than 3 years now.

    There are no other options I'm aware of with @home in my area.

    Anyone have any information on this? I'd sure like to knock a bit off the $50 a month I'm paying for cable modem service.

    ________

  • Add a large order of rydeline to that order.
  • That wouldn't be the way to go at all. Buy the Linksys WPC11 wireless cards. They're only $150 if you have a laptop and $150 + $49 for the PCI carrier if you have a desktop. 802.11B is the future, son. It's a nice fast network and not too costly either. (By the way, the carrier doesn't work in Linux yet, but they're working on the drivers.)
  • I am sure the various european cultures had their own word for the winter festival for 1000s of years before the christian church

    Yule.

    came to power around the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century AD (476AD is commonly cited in the history books)

    The Council of Nicea. After Constantine Christianitized what was left of the Roman empire, the council set about selecting the official Christian writings. This is the first point in history at which Christianity would have been recognizable as such to a modern Christian. Some of the ideas suppressed at Nicea were quite bizarre by modern standards. Read up on Gnosticism sometime :-)

    The Yule festival was co-opted much later, during campaigns to Christianize the northern barbarians.

  • Beware the service agreement....Charter Pipeline PROHIBITS connecting a "server" to their cable internet service. My firewall log shows they do regular port scans to enforce it too.
  • anyone know how to get the stats of the modem through snmp ? or atlest know the port and stuff...its a rca
  • Cable modems and DSL modems are going the way of the cell phone- Who the hell ever BUYS their cell phone outright anymore?? The cost is absorbed in the fee. The same thing is happening with DSS satellite receivers- If you agree to pay for a whole year's subscription up front, you get the equipment and installation for free. If you purchase the equipment and install it yourself and pay by the month, the subscription for the service after one year is NOT ONE PENNY cheaper.
  • Actually, it wasn't quite free, I still had to pay the 5% tax on it
    Wouldn't 5% sales tax on free still be free? =)
  • Your monopoly ain't no worse off than our monopoly. In my locale, Cox Cable bought out AT&T after AT&T bought out TCI after TCI bought out Cablevision, all within a three year period. (Tell me our bill ain't screwed up.) Well, I recently signed up for @home, add their $40/mo to our having digital settop boxes at $35/mo X 2, and I have a cable bill of $110.
  • This is cool, I can find something at the Shack to get a cable modem, I live in MD and already subscribe but it'd be nice to get rid of the rental fee on my bill.

    Speaking of free aol and free hardware. I just started getting a new free mailing from aol... a cd in a DVD case. I'm sure you can by them somewhere, but thanks AOL for sending me a case... your cd is in the trash.

  • Just as a helpful hint, you can order Starband satellite internet access directly from Starband [starband.com]. It costs $600 for the equipment, requires Windows 98 or 2000 because it is USB, not ethernet, and is $70 a month. They also say that they will install it within four weeks.
  • Radio Shack is just reversing the deal. It should be: Radio Shack is giving their customers a "$100 Cool Things Card". This will be given Free to customers who purchase Comcast Cable High-speed Internet service (Comcast @Home - modem and self install). The customers cannot use the $100 card towards the buy-down of the modem. The "Cool Things Card" is a gift card that can be used to buy other merchandise at Radio Shack.
  • .. I use the internet to aviod talking to idiots..

    Then what the hell are you doing on Slashdot then???

  • I can't see why you'd want to do that...? A cable modem still requires a network card, so why not just get some cat-5 cable and hook up the network cards?
  • At The Wiz, you have to commit to two years of Optimum Online service AND spend $100 on other stuff to get the cable modem for free. This modem is supposedly "no strings attached," which means that you could potentially sell it for less than the Wiz is charging to someone in the New York area.

    Of course, knowing Cablevision's mindset on cable ("no access for you!") they would probably shut this down in a heartbeat. It took a lot of coaxing to make them let me set up my cable modem with Linux last year, when they were only doing in-home installs.
  • the only problem with the msn kiosks is the cyber patrol software, there's a bit of a delay when first going to a domain while it checks and sees if it's kosher... kinda makes the satelite seem a bit slow at first, had a customer comment that his dialup was faster, once he got going though he was hooked =)

    Now if they just didn't have to buy the NMQ system :)

  • Here's another perspective:

    I've had DSL service from two different providers. With one of them, I owned the DSL modem and with the other (my current provider) I lease the hardware, and I'm much happier with leasing.

    The reason is that this DSL stuff isn't 100% reliable, at least in my area, and it really sucks to call tech support just to have them tell you that everything looks fine on their end and so the problem must be your hardware and would you please just call them back when you've replaced your modem. And yes, they'd be more than happy to transfer you to their warranty replacement department. What? Your modem is more than 90 days old? Well, in that case they'd be happy to transfer you to sales.

    Nope, I much prefer my new provider because they own and are responsible for the whole shootin' match, right up to the ethernet cable that plugs into my router. If anything goes wrong, they send someone out to fix it. Or at least they say that's what they'll do, because there's never been a problem.

  • You may be able to get IDSL. It costs more than ADSL or cable, and is much slower (144K), but it's worlds better than dialup. It works at 30,000 ft. or more from the central office, so you can get it in lots of places that are far beyond ADSL distance limits.

    (I was unable to get ADSL, and the cable modems here are "one-way".)
  • Oh, for shame. Why do you insist on paying full retail?

    go to price watch for WPC11 [pricewatch.com] starting at $120 + 8 s/h
    or for 802.11b [pricewatch.com] starting at $118 + 6 s/h
    or for 802.11b pci [pricewatch.com] starting at $160 + 6 s/h

    enjoy!


    TangoChaz

    --------------------
  • hehe, mines free. 8mb/s down 768k/s up. And I haven't even tweaked the head end yet. Since I'm one of the only people in my neighborhood who has cable, I should be able to get close the the maximum for my modem which is 30 down and 8 up.

    For free.


    ---GEEK CODE---
    Ver: 3.12
    GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
    W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+
  • Actually, some of the 'cable modem booster' registry tweaks do make a difference... at least they did under Windows 98SE on my box. I did the tweaks listed at speedguide.net [speedguide.net] in their Cable and DSL Tweaks section and was able to get a 30% increase in throughput. (based on actual tests) Most noticable at 3am... but hey, I'm on then alot.
  • http://www.tandy.com/companyinfo/Internet_Html_Pag es/footer.asp?URL=RSH-2000-036G.htm
  • My situation is similar to yours. Comcast FINALLY called to offer me a comcast@home connection, but it was one way, (download), only. I would still have to use my phone line for the uplink. They wanted me to pay the same montly fee as for the two way service being offered elsewhere. I told them to forget it. I'll get by with my (nominally), 56K modem connection until the REAL service arrives.
  • What would I want at Radio Shack for $100? :-)
  • To do Arcnet you'd have to have Arcnet cards and drivers, which means ISA cards, which means jumpers and IRQ/base memory address settings.

    10Base-2 aka 'thinwire' ethernet runs over RG-58 coax with BNC connectors on the ends, but i dunno how well cable TV coax would work - it's a different gauge.

    It's probably easier to string a few Cat5 cables than to muck with any of this archaic stuff.

    --
  • Not true, I'm using @home and have to lease my cable modem ($15/month). I think it depends on your local provider.
  • Today in Newsday, New York's local cable provider (Optimum Online) ran a full-page ad in which it proclaimed that its cable modems would make AOL run faster. Imagine that -- using AOL as a selling point, catering to the uneducated masses who think that AOL _is_ the Internet. Of course, in the small print, they mention that AOL will still cost you at least $9.95 per month, and that Cablevision doesn't manage AOL. Of course, that combination of brilliant marketing will mean that there are now two points of failure for Joe Home User connecting to AOL, not to mention a lot of Cablevision billing reps flooded with calls from users wondering why their AOL now costs more than twice as much as it used to.
  • Nah, the cable modem is technically "on loan" to you and can only legally be used with Windows95 or 98. Oh, and all your packets will be routed through a logging facility, for market analysis. :)

  • Re:almost never go into radio shack (Score:5)

    by Trevor Goodchild ( 187368 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @07:39PM (#542444)

    Nothing says "High Fidelity" like Realistic. True audiophiles like myself are always shopping at The Shack to purchase the latest in equalizers and DSP devices to provide the warmth that you can't get anymore now that everything has gone digital. It is absolutely absurd to go out and buy some stripped down box for $1,500 when you can have all the latest in 5 channel simulated theatre and multiple hall settings.

    I've got this friend who spent close to 2 G's on some Nadcomm thing that he was all proud of. I went over to his house to check the thing out and he pops the cover with a flourish. I take a look and... there isn't a damn thing in it! Couple tiny boards and like three freaking wires connecting it all together! Compare this to my Optimus reciever (yeah, it's a bit snooty for my tastes, too) which is so packed with electronic goodness that you couldn't squeeze a paper clip into the thing and only cost me $299!

    Anyway, I hide my skepticism and tell him to fire it up. Guess what? He can't because the freakin' thing doesn't have an amplifier and the one he wants is out of stock! Two thousand dollars and it doesn't even fucking do anything!

    So the next week I went back to The Shack and bought a project box, a coupla RCA plugs, some A/B toggles, and a dual gang pot. I throw it all together and show my friend my sweet contraption that does the same thing as his but not only cost less than $100, it doesn't even need to be plugged in! I figure he'd feel like a fool and take his box back for a refund, but he just looked at me and shook his head like I was some kind of moron. I just don't get it...

  • if you paid more than nothing in taxes, then you got screwed! *grin*

    I guess you could always ask the government for the tax refund :)

  • I remember reading a few stories of people hooking up DSL equipment to their lines without subscribing for it(borrowed/ebayed a DSL modem, and what not), and suddenly finding other people in Network Neighborhood.

    Anyone got more detail on it? This was like 3 years ago.

    I wonder if the same thing will happen with these freebie modems.

  • Break out the soldering station! (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @09:02PM (#542454) Homepage

    Soon we will be buried in "free" hardware and AOL CDs.

    At least you can use free hardware for door stoppers, expensive-looking paperweights, and - if you can throw together a Van Der Graff generator with a couple of stainless steel bowls and a very big rubber band - graphic demonstrations to your boss of why he shouldn't carry unbagged DIMMs across the office carpets on dry winter days.

    After you've done your static demonstration, perhaps all the little status LEDs on the unit will blink even without cable or UTP connections. Then, your little expensive-looking paperweight has been bestowed with LBL-factor.

    ("LBL" = "Little Blinking Light", (c)1993 Lawrence Wade.)

    LBL-Factor is, of course, incredibly useful; it keeps people from playing with all the techical-looking stuff on your desk, and it makes one appear smarter than the combined calculating ability of the collection of neurons in one's cranium. This increases your worth to your employer because your projects are no longer interrupted by upstart 23-year-old mechanical engineers who think that they're computer literate and therefore touch the pile of hardware scattered all over your desk, as well as making your boss feel that he's getting a better deal for your services than he actually is. (This, of course, means that he's basically resigned to the fact that he's gonna have to give you a big fat raise soon.)

    Thus far, these potential benefits have been tested and demonstrated with an old Anderson-Jacobsen 2400 baud leased-line modem; all this is undoubtedly possible from a little cable modem, especially if it has a cryptic brand name prominently displayed on the front of the case (as cable modems around here tend to have).

    Is there any use more clever than signing up for cable Internet service?

    See above.

    If you can get a couple of these, with a little creative hacking (and a good reflow soldering system) you might be able to make a long-distance coax network bridge.

    Then, you could hit the ARRL's website [arrl.org], grab the schematics for a good 2kW RF linear amplifer and plans for a nice efficient antenna, and give yourself wireless networkability... and big FCC fines. :)

    (And can you examine data which passes through it without violating an implied agreement? ;) )

    Sure! Plug it into your computer, toss it at a cable connection, install the drivers and a packet sniffer, and watch the entire contents of your hard disk being updated to the cable company for "market research" purposes.

    <sigh>

    It's probably unhealthy that I become more paranoid when I'm tired.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You are forgetting a few things here:

    1) ALL cable companies have protected terratories, no other company can attempt to compete in an existing service area with the existing cable co.

    2) Almost all cable internet service is actually RoadRunner or AT&T, and they sell internet access to the cable co's, and maintain the networks as well. The cable co's do little else than put their name on it and advertise it.

    So yes, Comcast may very well be a monopoly, but they are protected. This was done originally to protect the investment of the cable co's many years ago when they were running all the wire, etc. That was the only way that (they claim) they could insure a return on their investment. Wish I had that insurance for any business I start, but I digress...

    DSL, as you however, can go two different ways. I currently have Verizon (JUNK!) but I have only one other ISP offering DSL in my area. The other ISP, however, only resells Verizon service. Some DSL providers have co-located servers at the telco and do not depend on the local telco's network. This is probably the better situation, especially if your local telco is Verizon. Unlike the telco, they most likely won't also be a monopoly so good service is the only thing that will keep their customers. I will probably get a cable modem when it becomes available in my area, but either way, you are getting Time Warner or AT&T in the end. Ever wonder why the cable co so reluctant to offer service or tech support? It's pretty much a loss leader for them to keep people off of satelite, they make very little money at all on cable internet service.

  • Lots of places have been giving you the hardware free... or leasing it free with a free setup. I got RCN Cable Modem [rcn.com] service a year ago. It was free setup, free leased modem, $40 a month, no contract, when I signed up. Granted there were a couple months that were hell as they grew their network, but things seem to be running smoothly now. I'm guessing that they've probably set the cable modem up so that it will only work with their network.

    By the way, I very much agree with the other posts here that prefer leased hardware over owned hardware. I'm on my 3rd cable modem (the Hybrid modems are kinda flakey). Each time I've had major problems, it was traced to a flakey modem. Swapouts aren't too painful. Buying a new modem is.

    Kinda Offtopic Note: Oh yeah... and if you're using a cable modem, make sure all your cable lines are clean (no staples or nails through em) and that all your splitters give less of a signal loss to the cable modem side of the wire. The better the signal, the better your performance.
  • Well, I don't live in the US, but I do have cable. I live in Austria, and there are other cable services in the UK (I believe), Sweden, etc. So you're over-generalizing a bit, it's not *just* the US ...


    UK, Sweden, Canada, Nederlands, Australia...
  • On a RedHat 7.0 style system (also 6.2 IIRC), set the DHCP_HOSTNAME variable in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-INTERFACE file to the desired hostname. In Windows you set the computers name to the desired hostname, also you may want to enable DNS and set the correct hostname and domain as well. For example, hostname "c780677-a", domain "[cityname]1.[2letterstateabbrev].home.com". Also set the workgroup to "@HOME".

    Is that DHCP_HOSTNAME a documented setting? I never could find that myself and added it manually to /sbin/ifup.

    On Debian (which I use now for my cable router), it's in /etc/network/interfaces, FYI for anyone interested.

  • RCA Cable Modems work fine with... (Score:5)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @06:29PM (#542475) Homepage Journal

    My RCA Digital Cablemodem works fine with:

    Single machine (win9x, winNT, win2k, linux), or

    Linux as NAT router to hub, or

    Win2k with WinRoute as NAT router to hub, or

    Dedicated linux-based VPN-tunneling NAT router to switch.

    I'm sure other schemes will do just fine for you.

  • I haven't had to pay for my @Home cable modem since getting the service 2 years ago. Right at the start they offered the cable modem with a "free rental" and every bill stated "Cable modem : Limited free rental ($10 reg)" yet this continues to go on.

  • I suspect cable is cheaper here; i pay $26.90 (in american dollars) / month.

    It's about the same here - I pay $29/mo.

  • High speed connections & free equipment (Score:3)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @06:35PM (#542480)
    Many cable ISPs and DSL providers are going the way of waving the equipment fee, assuming that the cost is easily adsorbed by the monthly fee. My telocity connection, for example, only incurred a $25 overnight shipping charge for their modem, with a reported cost of equipment and installation being around $250. Of course, the equipment is 'leased' in this case, but it's probably similar for other cases as well.

    Of course, being from Radio Shack, I'd be very wary in the first place.

  • When I signed up for DSL from Verizon they gave me the DSL modem and the ethernet card for free* that is you get the modem for free so long as you stay with them for a year...which is still a good deal

  • aol (Score:2)

    by KevinMS ( 209602 )

    Does anybody know if dsl/cable is worrying AOL? I cant help but wonder that if dsl/cable became huge, if everybody traded up in bandwidth, in the next few years would AOL be toast?
  • Yeah, when I was getting my cable modem, I looked into how much the price was with leasing and with buying it outright. Hands down, leasing is better. Considering my father has gone through three cable modems in the last three years he's had the service, owning your own hardware is just going to end up costing you a lot more, even if you keep the cable service (or DSL, or whatever) long enough to pay off the initial investment and start seeing savings.
  • I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere with a 26400 dialup and I hate it.

    I went into Radio Shack a couple months ago and asked about their MSN Broadband with the small dish. The guy there told me it was only available in St.Louis. I promptly asked how satellite(sp?)access could be limited to a single state when its up in space. He said "OH, I thought you meant DSL."

    I also asked what a CueCat was (I already knew about them, I just wanted one without getting funny looks). The guy explained it for about 5 minutes. "YOU GOT CANNED CORN? you Put this ON the can of corn, and you can SEE, what you can MAKE, with CANNED CORN!"

    ah I love radio shack :)
  • You got questions, we got blank stares -- RadioShack
  • Unfortunately, you can't just hook up 2 cablemodems together and expect them to talk. You also need to get a broadband router with a cable module, and they're not exactly cheap. Basically, when a cable modem comes on line it needs to search for a forward and return carrier, then download its configuration settings through the cable connection.
  • Is there really a point to doing this? Just get yourself some network cards with some copper or fiber cable - you'll get alot further and it'll cost you alot less...
  • A search on ebay [ebay.com] reveals that RCA cable modems are all going for over a hundred. Sure, some of them have no bids right now, but who knows. You could also try other auctions sites if Ebay is flooded with them. Spend a hundred on electronics and get a modem that you sell for a hundred. Math looks good to me :)

  • Re:connecting them together (Score:3)

    by buhr ( 97820 ) on Friday December 22, 2000 @10:50PM (#542520)

    The only other thing you need is a cable company.

    The problem is two-fold. First, these modems are broadband devices that transmit and receive at different sets of frequencies. The downstream signal is transmitted from the cable head-end and received by the modem at relatively high frequencies (above 550MHz, up past most analog broadcast channels). However, the modems transmit at relatively low frequencies (down at 5-42MHz, below the analog broadcast channels). Worse yet, the modems use different modulation techniques for transmitting and receiving. Even if modem 2 could "hear" what modem 1 was transmitting spectrum-wise, it couldn't understand it anyway.

    Second, the modems rely very heavily on control software at the cable head-end. This software, in addition to doing the usual high-level configuration like authenticating users and assigning IP addresses, also does low-level configuration, like telling a cable modem what channel it should transmit on, what time slot it can transmit in, and so on.

    The bottom line is that the technology was cleverly and carefully developed to make the client technology as cheap and simple as possible. All the intelligence and complexity is in the head-end.

    Getting two cable modems to talk without the cable company is exactly like getting two cell phones to talk without the phone company.

  • Yes, it was, which is why it and time warner merged/are merging.

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